Internet Coast living up to Name

19th Jun 2000

It was an interesting week, to say the least, for South Florida’s tech industry.
Then, on top of that, BizProLink.com, a Boca Raton company looking to hire 40 or so more people, actually had the guts to send an airplane over Citrix headquarters the next day towing the message banner “Options losing altitude?” BizProLink.com is hiring.”

Talk about a clever way of stealing employees away from another company.

Harsh as it might have been on poor Citrix, I thought the prank might have actually helped both companies in another way.

See, it’s like this: We want to be like Silicon Valley, in our case the Internet Coast, but now we’re actually starting to act like it.

Fact is, BizProLink’s little prank would be nothing new to the techies out there, who are so in such demand that recruiters hang out at local restaurants and try to snag them at lunch.

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Then came the important network access point, or NAP, discussion on Thursday, where the entire InternetCoast NAP committee decided that they want to put one in Miami.

A NAP acts like an “Internet international airport” and lets Internet carriers transfer traffic from one carrier to another.

If one were to be built in South Florida - the closest one to here is in Virginia - setting up a dot-com here would be less expensive than other states, which in turn will attract more companies here and make the InternetCoast initiative even more powerful.
So far, nine Internet carriers have shown their support.

I think they should follow BizProLink’s drastic example and take to the air with their message to get companies like BellSouth to agree to it as well, before another state gets one first.